Persistent identifiers (PIDs)

Topic, definition and scope

• Persistent identifiers (PIDs) are globally unique, actionable and machine-resolvable strings that act as a long-lasting reference to a digital object (e.g. a dataset).
• Six examples of PIDs are included in the table below (more are available within FAIRsharing’s identifier schema sub-registry and within the Bioregistry).
• Find out more about standards including PIDs with FAIRsharing’s standards factsheet
• Bioregistry catalogues identifier resources (e.g., DOI, ORCID, ROR) that assign PIDs. It stores metadata such as their base URL, local unique identifier regular expression pattern, preferred prefix for semantic web contexts, mappings to other registries (e.g., FAIRsharing, BARTOC), and more. Bioregistry has the benefit of being fully open source and having fully open CC0 data to promote community curation and maintenance.

• The benefits of assigning PIDs are numerous:
  • Disambiguation (e.g. between two researchers who have the same first and last names, using their ORCID ID)
  • Increase research citation and reach of research outputs
  • Contribute to making research data FAIR (see section “FAIR element(s)” for more details)
  • Permanent identifiability/referencability/linkage of scientific output/people/institutions/funders

FAIR element(s)

(from the FAIR data maturity model: https://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2020-041)

• Findable
  • F1 RDA-F1-01M Metadata is identified by a persistent identifier (essential)
  • F1 RDA-F1-01D Data is identified by a persistent identifier (essential)
  • F3 RDA-F3-01M Metadata includes the identifier of the data (essential)
• Accessible
  • A1 RDA-A1-03M Metadata identifier resolves to a metadata record (essential)
  • A1 RDA-A1-03D Data identifier resolves to a digital object (essential)

Summary of Tasks / Actions

1. Present an example where disambiguation is needed (e.g. two authors with the same name). Identify additional entities that might benefit from being assigned a PID (e.g. research data, text publication, institutions). Finally, define PIDs together.
2. Present widely-used PIDs and how their syntax can look like: * DOI * ORCID * ROR * DMP-ID * IGSN ID * RAiD * More are available within FAIRsharing’s identifier schema sub-registry
3. Examples of use cases * Data repositories
   • Example of actionable PID (= resolver + PID):
   • Resolver: https://dx.doi.org/
     • DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3333025
   • Resolve to the landing page of the repository showing metadata: https://zenodo.org/record/3333025. “Real” data can be downloaded from this page.
     • Enabling compute workflows (e.g. https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.12168.1)
     • Identifying (chunks) of code
4. Show the importance of PIDs for FAIR data by referring to the FAIR elements mentioned in the section “FAIR element(s)”.
5. How to use PIDs to access research data and other resources? * Dataset (e.g. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3333025) * Text publication (e.g. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.6674301) * Data management plan (e.g. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5995707) * Physical sample (e.g. IGSN ID: AU1243) * Resource descriptions (e.g.Databases, standards, policies) through FAIRsharing DOIs e.g. Dryad https://doi.org/10.25504/FAIRsharing.wkggtx * Organisations (https://ror.org/) - ROR IDs and associated incl metadata and parent-child relationships e.g. Harvard https://ror.org/03vek6s52 * Research project
6. Explain how to receive a PID for research outputs * Repositories (e.g. Zenodo) * PID minting
7. Show that proper use of PIDs supports collaboration across facilities, disciplines, institutions and countries. Examples: * Pesant, S. et al. Open science resources for the discovery and analysis of Tara Oceans data. Sci. Data 2:150023 doi: 10.1038/sdata.2015.23 (2015) * Where PIDs are used for terminologies (e.g. ontologies), they allow unambiguous naming/labelling of things, which in term allows for useful/practical data sharing/integrating and, for instance, knowledge graphs.
8. Provenance and versioning (see R1.2) * Define resource and metadata provenance. * Explain why provenance information is an important aspect of FAIR data. * Find out together how PIDs can contribute to provenance. * Define dataset versioning and dynamic datasets. * Explain how PIDs are used in relation to different versions of a dataset or dynamic datasets. * Versioning exercise.
9. Introduce PID graphs and explain their importance with a use case (e.g. of use cases can be found here: https://github.com/datacite/freya/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3A%22PID+Graph%22++label%3A%22user+story%22+)

Materials / Equipment

• Personal computer
• Internet connection
• Browser

References

• Bobrov E. et al. 2021-10-07. Workshop on Research Data. Berlin University Alliance and ZB MED - Information Centre for Life Sciences. Google Slides.
• Cozatl R. et al. _2021-11. _Workshop on Research Data Management. Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg and ZB MED - Information Centre for Life Sciences. Google Slides.
• https://support.orcid.org/hc/en-us/articles/360006971013-What-are-persistent-identifiers-PIDs-
• https://pidforum.org/t/persistent-identifier-pid-definition/1502
• https://doi.org/10.5438/7z70-1155
• https://doi.org/10.5438/j22a-5d79
• https://www.tib.eu/en/publishing-archiving/pid-service
• https://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2020-041
• https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6674301
• Staiger C. 2019-11-04. Introduction to persistent identifiers. DTL. PowerPoint Slides (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3539188)
• https://pidforum.org/t/why-use-persistent-identifiers/714
• https://www.raid.org.au/
• 23 identifier schemas registered within FAIRsharing - let us know if any are missing!
• FAIRsharing’s educational factsheet about standards

Take home tasks/preparation

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